Better Party Features and Diablo 3 Patch v1.08 Details

Two blue posts sharing more details on upcoming changes and content Blizzard is hoping to get into Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.8.

identify all is coming in patch 1.08 🙂
Vaneras: That is the plan indeed 🙂

Other things we are hoping to have ready for patch 1.0.8:

Improved mob density for Acts 1, 2, and 4 so that you do not always feel like you have to farm Act 3 all the time.

Multi-crafting to make it easier to craft in bulk, i.e. you will be able to specify how many of any given item or gem you wish to craft.

Auction House tooltip compare that will make it easier to compare items in the AH with items you are wearing.

We will of course give you more specific information on what exactly will be in the next patch once we get closer to release 🙂

I’m curious to see how the multi-crafting and ID-all change the economy. After all, in Diablo 3 as in the real world, time = money. (Or gold.) Personally, the time required (wasted) to ID and sell/salvage rares is a major reason I pick up so few types of Rares, and I’ve long believed that the time you have to spend clicking buttons in the Jeweler’s interface is a definite factor in the price of higher level gems. Once those actions can be done in bulk, I figure I’ll get less choosy about the item types I pick up, and I might even start salvaging my own mats, instead of just buying them.

Elsewhere, we’ve got another post from Wyatt Cheng, in which he agrees with fans that the co-op features in Diablo 3 need improvement, though he’s not ready to share any specific plans as to how they might be improved in the future.

Yea I was thinking this same thing. I played with two others today and did my normal farming route, and my efficiency was cut in half. It wasn’t even me carrying them they aren’t bad players or poorly geared, it just slows everything down so much and doesn’t really add any benefit. Co-op is the opposite of fine when it’s bad in every way possible to add more people to the party.Wyatt Cheng: We are looking to improve co-op farming efficiency in 1.0.8. Co-op play in general is a big focus of the 1.0.8 patch and efficiency is definitely one component of that. Co-op is already more efficient for some players, but this is the exception rather than the norm. The degree of co-op efficiency depends heavily on the co-ordination of the party, skill builds, and the relative gear level of the teammates. Since launch we’ve made some modest changes to encourage co-op play but there’s still room to go farther. At the same time, we don’t want to go so far as to make multiplayer feel “mandatory” for those who prefer to play solo, but we still want to err on the side of being co-op favorable.

There’s also a number of hurdles to co-op play beyond raw efficiency, so we’ll be looking to alleviate/solve some of those hurdles too. The Identify All feature in 1.0.8 is an example of this. Sometimes the trip back to town to sort through a bag of gear is enough of a hurdle to make somebody feel playing co-op isn’t worth it. Nobody wants to be in the dungeon fighting monsters while your teammate is off in town identifying a full inventory.

It’s kind of odd, seeing the devs always agreeing with the players these days. I remember so many months of Bashiok arguing against fans who wanted big changes and improvements and defending the current game features. That was his job of course, and who knows what he really thought of the dev issues, but it’s weird to think back over so many months of the developers telling us that they knew best and trying to make us play it how they wanted us to play it. At least compared to now, where Wyatt and Travis seem to agree at least 95% with the general fan consensus on everything good and bad about Diablo 3.

It’s almost like D3’s development has become a sort of community-directed official mod, where we all argue for changes and the devs (promise to) implement them.

i don’t know man if you consider this activity or the results of it’s extensions (Gold for AH) to be a fun past time i pity you, you and the guy who thought that clicking 40 minutes straight on a button to create an item as dull as the d3 gems was a good idea.

I would just boot up D3, put my mouse curser over the craft button and watch some tv or something. I don’t really enjoy it, but making some money instead of just getting crappy rares is always nice. Making 30k on a gem when it only takes ~2 min (or less) to craft adds up to around 1 mil an hour.

I find it hard to believe it is even possible to balance co-op efficiency given the massive range in player DPS. How can you be so sure that co-op will be efficient when the players you group with could have anywhere from 3x your DPS to just 1/10?

Since most players are already level 60 with many characters, I don´t understand why there aren´t any benefits from co-op besides the shared exp.

Perhaps for a new player that joins tha game you can have a +magic find/gold find bonus as it used to be? Or the more players there are, more mob density?
Maybe having new bosses scattered around the acts when the party is full, or since the monster have more HP, then having the players deal more damage, skills becoming more powerful, or the like?

Back when they were first talking about more benefits for party play, many players (including myself) thought that allowing more NV stacks in an MP game was an easy and obvious solution. 6, 7 8, or maybe 7, 9, 10, with 2, 3, 4 players. That or some kind of EXP stacks that would add to your exp gain, if not MF/GF. Basically the D2 system, but with some more visual indicator.

Perhaps the devs will yet come around to that; they seem to be slowly and grudgingly accepting most of the other fan suggestions and D2 systems they initially tried to improve/differentiate upon.

Do you remember when the devs said all the time “anything we do is planned so that it will not harm co-op”? Everything they did was harm co-op. Its good that they are addresing the issues now, but didn´t they noticed the decreased in co-op games? I find that hard to believe.

There’s a point of professional pride (hubris?) in doing things your own way without just copying what others did. I watch sports and see it all the time there with teams that get a new front office who immediately clean house and get rid of most of the old players, regardless of whether or not they were any good. They want to win with their own players, because fans WILL criticize and say “you won, but you needed the previous front office’s players do win.”

I imagine the thought process is similar with how they design D3. They don’t want to copy D2, because it would feel like admitting they don’t have any good ideas. So they start out by changing everything. A tell-tale sign they think its gone VERY wrong is when they start implementing things from the previous game. That takes a lot of humility.

I got really excited when they announced the increased experience rewards for playing on higher monster levels, at least until I realized it was Inferno only. I hope they don’t make that mistake again and make the density increase something for Inferno again, I really want to level up some alts but they keep adding stuff and then limiting it to only help end game players. Experience boosts, nephalem valor, and possibly even the mob density judging from one of their posts.

Some people actually like leveling characters that aren’t end game, how about some love for them?

I’m not saying D3 is a bad game or any of that nonsense that people love to throw around, I’m just saying I would enjoy some benefits being extended to playing a character that isn’t maxed out for a change, As it stands right now I just log in, play for an hour, get bored and log off. It’s the same old game until you get to 60 when all the fun stuff suddenly kicks in. Make the rest of the game just as much fun as level 60.

have you leveled a character since MP came out? the bonus from monster power is way noticable. i was able to level up about 5x as quick compared to release, if not quicker.

monster density while leveling is fine, when you play with monster power (or even if you don’t) you are already higher level than the monsters are in the current questing area, as long as you arent skipping mobs unnecessarily (and why would you? if you already want MORE monsters).

and yes, they have said pretty specifically that increase in monster density is for inferno.

This may be the final nail in the coffin for me then, I’m a little tired of only 60+ getting any love in this game.

And yes, I know MP gives xp bonuses, but they get even better…in inferno. And you get better monster density…in inferno. And you get valor…at 60. You get new crafting recipes…in inferno. There is no love for the rest of the game and I’m honestly just tired of waiting for it.

Nobody, unless you’re looking at things like perfect Leorics, but I would like to think most people aren’t playing this game like it’s some kind of money making machine. Getting to 60 as it is right now is nothing more than a tedious chore though. Act 1 should be a tutorial, not the entire game before level cap. If it isn’t any fun getting to the end game why would I want to bother getting there in the first place, that is a horrible way to get people to enjoy your product.

As it stands right now there have been basically zero improvements to the pre-60 game. I can think of only one off the top of my head, that being monster power. But for 60+…

New Gems: inferno drops only. How about a new gem type we can all enjoy?
New unique ring: inferno drops only. How about some new lower level uniques or sets?
New crafting recipes: inferno drops only. How about some new lower level crafting stuff?
Better MP bonuses: inferno only. Why can’t we have the bonuses before inferno?
Monster Density improvements: inferno only from what I can see. Why can’t we all enjoy more monster before inferno?
Nephalem Valor: 60+ only. Why can’t we have this before 60? Would be a great incentive to actually play for longer periods of time.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the game for what it is, but I am not going to continue to support the game financially when an expansion comes out if all the content is going to be got 60+ or inferno only. I want to enjoy the entire game, not just the end game.

The saddest thing about D3 is when you see a ‘XXX million budget “build” guide’. In D2, when you want to create a specific build (or your own experimental build), all you need was your ‘vision’, patience and hard work. And this was fun, building your character from scratch. In D3 all you need is gold, because drop rate is so low, that you must be crazy to even consider a specific item to drop. And because there are no builds and items are just stat sticks….

Honestly, they have statistics tracking player behavior pretty comprehensively, and I think in this case you’re screwed just by virtue of being on the wrong side of history.

Most people got to 60 with one character (if they intended to just play that one for a while) or multiple characters (if they wanted to play multiple characters) around 1.0.3 / 1.0.4. Because the game doesn’t reward leveling at all, there’s no reason to start a new character of a class they already have at 60. Then, on top of that, they added the Paragon system, which further encourages just one character for efficiency’s sake.

As a result, most people still playing the game are 60. Most people that quit the game that Blizzard hopes come back… they’re 60 too. There’s probably a tiny contingent of players in your boat, and when you look at development resource allocation, it’s just not efficient to spend them on a smaller group, who is going to hit 60 anyway and then require the resources to be spent on “endgame.”

For what it’s worth — I feel your pain, not in D3, but in WoW. I loved the leveling content in WoW (is that weird?), but I quit because the entirety of the endgame design was entirely group play. Eventually, development focused on reducing the leveling “grind” — i.e., content and time it takes to get through it — to essentially nothing, which cheapened everything but endgame in my eyes. So yeah, I think you’re pretty hosed until the expansion comes out and gives people new classes to level, in which case they’ll go back and add some content for non-endgame stuff.

How much time in d2 did you spend leveling a new character? Most time spent was farming gear. A tiny fraction was spent actually building up a new character. All the time was spent on the items.

I do get the idea that leveling in d2 was more engaging. Quest rewards were a motive to create alts and the skill system made low level play substantially different from max level – necromancer teeth, low level javazon skills, etc.

The d3 alt problem is there is absolutely zero reason to take your time leveling up a new character. Low level builds are very bad and substantially less fun to play than a level 60 build. In d2, I never desired for a rush to level 70. In d3, I actively sought one out. Low level play should be rewarded in more ways than it is now, but the end game is where the bulk of players spend their time. I do think there is value in making alts capable of farming some benefit for a level 60 character – ie like hellforge and socket quests in d2.

Not a coincidence at all, they’re just firing up the marketing machine again will try to sell you an expansion product in not too distant future. Worry not, after that deal has been made, you’ll probably be able to enjoy their aggressive passiveness and phlegm to the fullest again. 😉

Look I appreciate the fact that the D3 devs wanted to make their own game with its own style but they shouldn’t have removed quality of life features (like id all and instant crafting). This should have been common sense for them. Even the conversation dialogues that keep popping up while I’m farming ACT 3 are incredibly annoying. How that made it past their 7 year development cycle is beyond me…